can u buy neurontin onlineI am sure we are all familiar with The Hero’s Journey as described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), and as explored by (among others) Christopher Vogler. Campbell dubbed it the buy gabapentin 300mg uk, as he felt the story structure underlies many or even most narratives from around the world.

We may not agree about its necessity or ubiquity, and we may take exception to some of its aspects (for example, that the hero is traditionally gendered as male). However, there is no denying that many of the films and novels we encounter (especially in the adventure and fantasy genres) are based on this structure, and often to excellent effect. There is something very satisfying about it all, I feel, especially as the main point of the journey is for the hero to learn and grow by facing a variety of challenges and opportunities.

One of the parts of the journey I like best is The Road of Trials, and in particular the chance for the hero to identify their allies and enemies. This tends to happen within the early parts of the adventure, once the hero has left their ordinary world behind. The hero faces a number of tests, and one of the most interesting, I feel, is that they meet a number of new people (or other beings) and must astutely judge whether these new people will help or hinder the hero in their journey.

This often involves the hero seeing past the surface to the truths beyond. When Frodo finally decides he can trust Strider in The Lord of the Rings, for example, he says (in the novel), “You have frightened me several times tonight, but never in the way that servants of the Enemy would, or so I imagine. I think one of his spies would – well, seem fairer and feel fouler, if you understand.” [1]

A Prayer for my Daughter is a play by Thomas Babe, written in 1977 and first produced at the Royal Court, London in 1978. It was later revived at the Young Vic, London in 2008, with Colin Morgan in the role of Jimmy… Which is how I came to hear about the play later that year, when I watched the BBC show Merlin (2008–12) and quickly fell for Colin’s talent and charm.

So, you know. There’s something that needs to be said here, and I’m going to get it out of the way now. Then we can all be sensible and talk about the play and the character like rational adults. The thing is… if ever there was a reason to invent time travel or wish for the TARDIS, it’s that Colin Morgan was appearing naked on stage from 31 January to 15 March in 2008. If only I’d known. I’d have bought a ticket for every performance.

There.

Now that’s out of the way…

The play is set in the squad room of a downtown New York police station, overnight on 4–5 July. There are four characters: the cops Kelly (‘fat forties, beer gut and all’) and Jack (‘lean, more than a little cruel looking’); and the crooks Sean (‘has a little of the professor about him’) and Jimmy (‘pure punk but with the aspect of a choir boy’). Sean and Jimmy have been arrested for the murder of an old woman, the owner of a dry cleaning store, as part of a robbery gone wrong. As the hot July night slowly winds its way through to dawn, Kelly and Jack interrogate the pair, trying to bully or cajole a confession from one or the other. Despite their age difference, despite the fact that Jimmy is married with a young daughter, and despite the fact that Sean doesn’t do sex, Sean and Jimmy are a couple in many ways; their relationship is affectionate, intimate at times, and they share an offbeat spirituality.

This follows up on buy gabapentin 600 mg about the character Marion Ravenwood (played by the delightful Karen Allen) in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

Alas, the second and third Indiana Jones films were Marion-less, but to my great joy she returned in the fourth film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).

Crystal Skull is set in 1957, a full 21 years after Raiders‘ setting of 1936, which means that Marion must be in her late forties by now. My kind of age, in fact! And we’re certainly not too old for an adventure or for love, me and Marion.

The 1950s

One of the things I love about these films is that their stories revolve around the concerns of the time in which they’re set. In place of the earlier preoccupation with Nazi Germany, we now have the perils of atom bomb testing, and Cold War-era Russians as the bad guys, along with references to the Roswell crash site. Ultimately the story’s solution involves aliens (or ‘inter-dimensional beings’) in a flying saucer-shaped ship. You can’t get much more fifties than that, and there are all kinds of other cultural references thrown in as well.

Recently, some young friends of mine were dissing the female characters in the Indiana Jones films. And I don’t really blame them; the films deliberately evince a nostalgia for bygone eras which don’t easily lend themselves to a modern take on who women are. However, I felt that I must speak out on behalf of Marion Ravenwood.

The first Indiana Jones movie was Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, released in June 1981 (when I was 18, good grief I feel old). It was one of those rare wonderful movies where we returned to the cinema again and again to watch and re-watch.

Way back in 1981, Marion Ravenwood was an incredible breath of intoxicatingly fresh air. This was, after all, pre-Xena, pre-Buffy, pre-Sarah Connor. Few female characters back then, even in films and television set in contemporary times, showed such spunk (and that is exactly the word I used at the time, for this was when I was living in Australia) or feistiness.

I know I am certainly not alone in loving the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, nor in enjoying the various film and television adaptations. One of the more recent adaptations has been the ITV series Lost in Austen, in which modern day Amanda Price (Jemima Rooper) finds that Elizabeth Bennet has stepped through a strange door into the bathroom of Amanda’s Hammersmith flat. Soon Amanda herself traverses this time-and-reality portal to find herself in the world of Pride and Prejudice, explaining herself away as Elizabeth’s friend.

Of course such a fundamental shift in characters sends the ‘proper’ story awry, starting with Bingley paying more attention to Amanda than to Jane Bennet, leaving Jane to be snatched up by the truly odious Mr Collins, at which Amanda (in an inspired piece of cross-pollination) chides, ‘Badly done, Bingley! Badly done.’

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I received a free copy of this novella from the author - the wonderful Relle - in return for an honest review.
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